Tracking Cycle Time Fluctuations

How often does your enterprise take the time to track the cycle times emerging from a given work cell? Are you even set up to track the fluctuations in these cycle times, or are your current manual processes making the entire exercise impossible? More importantly, how much better would your enterprise be if it were able to track cycle time fluctuations in real-time via an enterprise mobility network? In order to answer these questions, think of how important it is to isolate the root causes of down time. Think of the high costs of work stoppages and how these interruptions impact your production and ultimately, your company’s bottom line. Granted, analyzing cycle times and minimizing work stoppages is extremely difficult with manual tracking methods. However, it is a much easier endeavor when your company upgrades its production team to use rugged handheld mobile devices and barcode scanners. So, how can the right enterprise mobility solution empower your company to not only track fluctuations in cycle times, but ultimately eliminate the high costs associated with down time?

Cycle times and their value to production

Every manufacturer knows that there is a total production time for a finished good and separate times for each work operation. Reduce the times across all work tasks, and the company will increase its manufacturing throughput. However, it’s not merely about knowing what these cycle times are, but ultimately about knowing what they might become if the company makes some minor changes. Unfortunately, none of this is possible if the company lacks the necessary tools. Only by having access to real-time data can a manufacturer enact strategies to not only identify their benchmark cycle times, but to come as close to those cycle times as often as possible. So, is it really about perfection, or merely about the pursuit of perfection? Well, in reality, it’s ultimately about mitigating the impact of issues as quickly as possible. In this case, it’s the ability to respond in a timely manner that means the difference between success or failure.

Down time in manufacturing is sometimes unavoidable. Work stoppages do occur from time to time, even in the best of situations. Idle time is a reality and few companies are immune to the high costs of raw material and part shortages. However, the ability to respond to these issues is much easier when the entire team is linked through one enterprise mobility network. Production managers and planners can respond much quicker. Production employees can immediately notify team members of work stoppages and the entire company can see the impact of lost time and the benefit that comes of an immediate response. It’s about raising the bar on performance and trying to achieve excellence as often as possible. It’s the pursuit that matters and not necessarily always achieving the lowest possible cycle time. That happens when everyone can react in real-time and that happens with the right mobility management solution.